President-elect Drew G. Faust, in a statement to The Crimson:
I would be delighted to have a new calendar approved as it would represent a critical step in uniting the University.
Undergraduate Council President Ryan A. Petersen, in the same article:
Today’s announcement, according to UC President Ryan A. Petersen ’08 indicated the attentiveness of University leadership to student-driven advocacy.
“The undergraduates and the Undergraduate Council identified a problem and sought to address it, and the governing boards took our concerns seriously,” Petersen said.
Drew Faust says that the decision to reform the calendar was driven by administrative concerns. It is, to be sure, a quantum leap from the status quo of faculty independence among Harvard’s schools—the old-fashioned “every tub on its own bottom” approach. It will make cross-registration easier and will remove a hurdle to inter-faculty collaboration, which is in vogue these days.
Ryan Petersen sees the issue differently. For him, the change in calendar is a personal victory, the spoils of a hard-fought campaign against the powers-that-be which included a gazillion-word position paper, an undergraduate referendum, and a heartfelt argument about mental health, including anecdotes about vacations spent in tears thanks to looming exams, and final papers due on Christmas Day.
So, which narrative is the correct one? Did the Governing Boards see things Ryan Petersen’s way, or did the University make a long-overdue administrative change to address long-marinating administrative concerns? Or was it a little of both?
Last year, Dean of Harvard College Benedict H. Gross insisted that a change in the calendar was a simple matter of time. Once a new general education curriculum was on the books, the calendar would be on the docket. It’s curious that the Faculty was formally bypassed in President Bok’s decision, but the timeline laid out by Dick Gross months ago was held to nonetheless.
The bottom line, however, is that the calendar is set to change. And whatever the reasons behind the decision, you can be sure that a whole lot of people will take a whole lot of credit for a very popular decision.
(As a side note, Ryan would be well advised to start sharing the wealth on this one, if he wants to inflate a chosen successor’s chances of being elected next year. Whether or not the UC had anything at all to do with the change in calendar is moot—someone will take credit for it when running for the UC’s top job next winter. Ryan would be well advised to give that person some press time now, before the summer wipes Calendar Reform right out of the news cycle.)
